WASHINGTON -- Ellie Light, the ubiquitous letter writer arousing blogosphere suspicions that she is a White House operative spreading the gospel of Barack Obama, is actually a registered nurse. She lives in a California community near Bakersfield.

And her real name is Barbara Brooks. Or so she told The Plain Dealer today after a series of phone interviews, e-mails and records checks involving Brooks/Light, a family member, licensing records and property information.

The 51-year-old woman provided her address on Monday night to The Plain Dealer, and what she says is her real name in conversations today that followed checks of public records.

This followed The Plain Dealer's publication on cleveland.com Thursday that a woman using the name Ellie Light was duping newspapers nationwide by giving them "local" addresses in letters to the editor that she penned defending President Obama's progress in advancing the Democratic agenda. Many newspapers will not publish letters unless they are from local readers.

News of Light's tactics left multiple newspapers embarrassed, with some apologizing to their readers. But it also triggered suspicions in the blogosphere that Ellie Light might not even be real, and that the letter-writing campaign was a duplicitous spin strategy from the Obama White House or the Democratic Party.

As for the name: Brooks says she picked "Ellie Light" out of the blue. "It just sort of came to me," she said. "Apparently to everyone else on the Internet, it has much significance."

Her home is in Frazier Park, Calif. She works as a nurse, traveling to assignments throughout the country for lengthy stints. Her travels have made it easy for her to pick addresses to use when sending letters to editors of newspapers, many of whom believed falsely that she lived in their circulation areas.

"That was by design," she said of her small-newspaper strategy, "because I want to address people who never talk to a liberal. By design, I talk to smaller presses, hoping to get a dialogue going with some of the editors and some of the readers."

A proud Democrat, she said that "I want to deliberately talk to the enemy" and "people deep, deep in the red states."

As for the addresses she used, some from small communities and suburbs that out-of-towners might not recognize, Light/Brooks said that her job as a traveling nurse made her familiar with communities nationwide. "I do have friends" in the communities, and "I do live all over" when not at home. "I've been to probably 20 different hospitals."

In the telephone interview Monday night, she expressed a mix of amusement and aggravation at the claims she's heard since news of her story -- or what was known of it -- went viral, thanks largely to Drudge Report and other Web sites and then Fox News. She sees little logic in the claims that senior White House advisor David Axelrod is the wizard behind the letters.

"If I were part of this sort of Axelrod conspiracy," she said, "I wouldn't be whining about how unpopular Obama is."

Although her recent flurry of letters with multiple addresses has drawn recent attention, Light/Brooks said she's expressed her opinion on occasion over a number of years, including a piece on John Kerry during his presidential campaign.

"I don't do it often," she said. "I do it when I have something to say."

As for her politics, she used to be "pretty ultra-left" but grew tired of that after concluding that the far left wing lacked loyalty. That mindset, she said, is that "we don't care about the ultimate result, we just want purity."

"I no longer have use for that."

Incidentally, the woman known as Light has shared a phone number with others, which could encourage more people to track her down. But it might not work. She uses Skype, an online service, "and if someone goes completely gaga on me, I can simply change it," she said in an e-mail.

The Plain Dealer is not publishing her exact address, which can be difficult to find, because she says she has received e-mail threats that say, essentially, "We know who you are and we're coming to get you."

Follow Us

cleveland.com is powered by Plain Dealer Publishing Co. and Northeast Ohio Media Group. All rights reserved (About Us).The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Northeast Ohio Media Group LLC.